The editors of Time write: "For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world's largest faith to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is Time's 2013 Person of the Year."

Here's a pope, a former bouncer and literature teacher, who prefers the company of poor people to the "pomp and pageantry of the papacy."

Perhaps the coolest thing about Pope Francis is that he really seems to live his life asking "What would Jesus do?" -- and then doing it.

In Evangelii Gaudium, his first solo papal
exhortation, Francis was widely quoted as deriding capitalist economies. Yet
his complaint, a close reading would reveal, is that the pursuit of wealth, in
and for itself, has become a competing religion. What parent in the
now-infamous 1%, would not counsel his or her child that having money alone is
not proof of success, but using it wisely is?

Even before that, Francis stated a simple, if
uncomfortable, truth, when he acknowledged that the Church – and he meant the
American Catholic Church -- obsessed unduly over issues like abortion,
homosexuality and the ordination of women priests. To call Americans
sex-obsessed is like saying Christmas has become too commercialized. Yet the
pope's truism was instantly and incorrectly interpreted as embracing gay
marriage, abortion on demand, and females in celluloid collars. Like past
popes, he is opposed to all those things, and will never change his mind about
them.

So what does Francis believe? That the world is
unfair and that the Catholic Church should be in the business of helping
people.

Francis discomforts us, not because he is a communist who hates money – you'll notice collections are still being taken up at mass – but because he speaks to our better selves, and calls us out when we fail to live up to our potential.